Dyslexia

Call me Al

Our just turned 7 year olds teacher approached me at the school pick up last week wondering if I felt that he might have dyslexia.

This is not the first time this had been suggested. When he was in SI his then teacher mentioned it to me. However he seemed to outgrow whatever was going on and "symptoms" eased.

To summarise, he does not appear to have any difficulties reading. On the contrary, he has been streamed into the second highest standard group for reading in the class. When it was mentioned last year to me I asked how he was performing in comparison to his peers and I was told that he had excellent sten scores and that he was one of the stronger students in the class. His difficulty seems to be in spelling and reversals with both letters and numbers. His spelling is what has brought it to his teachers attention this time around. He is fine with his weekly spelling test, but his teacher had said his problem is sometimes with words she knows he knows, and that he should know easily, like come spelt as com or fall spelt as fal.
His handwriting is ok but very slow, and he and I have had to do a lot of work to bring it up to scratch.
Is it possible to be dyslexic and not have difficulties with reading?

I am also very aware that it might just be laziness on his part too, and that he is just wanting to get his work off the table and move on to something he likes doing.
Thanks
CMA

Moonbeam

It could be a related issue.
http://www.sess.ie/dyslexia-section/primary-school-signs-ages-7-12-years might be of help.
My best friend is dyslexic,she has an honours degree that she worked extra hard for and can read no bother but even now her spelling is terrible.

byhookorbycrook

Children with a good IQ and dyslexia can often learn coping strategies and mask their dyslexia. Spelling may let them down . I am puzzled though, as to why the teacher has thrown this out, especially if the child is not attending for Learning Support.

We have abolished weekly spelling tests in favour of using the Brendan Culligan system ,whereby the child learns words they need to learn (not a list given to the entire class, memorised for about 30 mins on the Friday and then never recalled in context.)

How are his gross and fine motor skills?

Call me Al

We are puzzled too, if not more than a little frustrated considering this is the second time this has been said to us yet we don't have definite feedback. Rather the feedback is all very vague. He has never been suggested for learning support , but his previous teacher did say that he would be assigned hours if anything was flagged as a problem. She indicated that at that time she saw he had a visual gap,and he was having problems copying words from the board to his copy. On some of the worksheets she showed me some of his writing was completely illegible to me. These things passed though, and by the end of the school year he seemed to have caught up with the others in this regard.
I raised this specific question at the PTM too, in light of his senior infants teacher's advice, and was told that it was not on her radar in 1st class. She showed us his work and said nothing had arisen to cause concern. His writing was very neat, tidy and perfectly legible. She is a very experienced and mature teacher who has the measure of him and I can tell she understands him.
His fine and gross motor skills are now good. His pencil grip took a while to develop but it's come together slowly for him. He has always hated colouring since playschool. His teachers there couldn't get him to the table, or stay there if he did actually sit so he may have started out at a disadvantage in JI. Some children could write their name by then, but he had no interest in learning how to do it.
She has told me that he is very slow with his writing, which is largely down to me telling him to take his time in forming his letters and numbers. If he races his writing is all over the place. He has an excellent vocabulary and as I said, his reading is fine. He has no difficulties with any readers assigned to him by his teacher and he is well able to keep up with the standards in the class, but his spelling is erratic and unpredictable. He might get it right, but then again he ight not.

Thanks for the feedback - much appreciated, as we don't know where to go from here, and I really don't want this to come up year after year with different teachers he encounters.

Eta he is an idiopathic toe-walker. I don't know if this is a related matter, but he does not have autism.